Dad, you can't retire: TIAA CEO's father didn't contribute to his 401(k) for 30 years

My dad, he worked for this company for over 30 years. And to know that Otis Brown, who worked extraordinarily hard to provide for us, had access to a very rich 401(k) plan, and he never contributed $1. That's 30-plus years of compounding that never got compounded. And to have the daughter tell the father that, Dad, you can't retire. This isn't enough. And immediately tell my dad, You're going to have to like max out. You have to take advantage of everything you can. And at the time, I'd just graduated, I was making $26,000 a year. I did not know I'd be in the position that I am in today, but my dad immediately maxed out. I don't know how they paid their bills because he took maximum contribution. And he did it because he said, You're the smart one. If you said this is what I need to do, I need to do it. And to know that it just required someone not being comfortable with beautiful fliers being enough, not being comfortable with just probably celebrating great benefits, but taking the time to reach someone like Otis Brown, to help him understand that those benefits were for him, too. That's all it took. And my dad immediately did that. And fast forward, he got to see the benefit of it. But he also felt bad that he could have changed the course of his life if he would have been able to know that that benefit was for him too. And so that deeply impacted me.